Chad was backed by France and indirectly by the US, and actually won in the end. Chad was Qadaffi's Vietnam.

Expanding on my own post, I recently looked into run-of-the-river small scale hydro but the calculations show that you'll need a fast flowing river to get any serious amount of energy. With wind-power it's easy to scale: make it higher and the blades longer. With hydro-without-a-dam you're stuck with sucking the same amount of energy from a single stream. It works for small scale power generation but it's not something that will contribute beyond that.

For serious large-scale hydro energy without dams, the only major contender I could think of is placing large amounts of gigantic turbines in the Gulf stream.

Hydro can be done without the dam, and it's just as efficient.

The problem is that this isn't the case. Those dams aren't there only for the flow fluctuations, more importantly is that a large body of water results in water flowing faster through the turbines. The potential energy is much higher when you have all that pressure behind the dam.

The only reason encyclopedias didn't add more information was because it wasn't feasible. Wikipedia was doing great, why would you want to limit it to only a subset of human knowledge? Information that I find trivial might interest my neighbor, so why would I delete an article about his precious snowflake? Why should my article about belly button lint have to be relevant?

Storage is cheap. Compared to wiki articles storage is insanely cheap. Someone can add articles about every flower in his local park and it still wouldn't cost more than a few MB. Extra articles don't clutter up anything.

Stop trying to place an arbitrary border around a subset of human knowledge and pretend you're the gatekeeper. The whole deletionist movement and infighting about relevancy has done Wikipedia much more harm than any article about an obscure anime series could ever do.

Give us our H2G2. If I don't think something is relevant, I'll simply ignore it.

Or, if the professor in question was going to attend this conference anyhow, then you could ask if he/she would be willing to present it in your place. A published paper might look good on your CV right out of school; at least it would give the interviewer something to talk with you about.

I was in the same boat a few years ago and did exactly this. I had a paper published in some eastern conference but really didn't have the time or money to go, but my supervisor did.

A published paper is a nice way to spruce up your resume and as an undergrad it shows you are willing to go the extra mile. Conferences themselves are only worthwhile if you are actually interested in the topic and want to continue your studies.

Conferences can be a costly affair, with travel costs and attendance fees. They make their money due to everyone wanting to publish and coming to present their work. IMHO papers and conferences have very little to do with actual science and everything to do with quota's, funding and the like. But that's another topic altogether.

Thanks for the tip.

I was using Clusty before it got Yippified, after that Scroogle. I'll give duckduckgo a try.

But now some other company, maybe one with a strong Intel partnership, can come along, scoop it up and run with it if they decide their existing OS is dying a slow death.

Except that they also could simply go with Android and let Google do most of the heavy lifting. Why go with Meego when you can get a supported and actively developed OS instead?

Every now and then someone rants about division between desktop Linux distributions being the cause of lack of adoption. In mobile Linux "distributions" there is one large player and porting to and from the various alternatives is much more complex.

Perhaps it's just better in the long run to rally around Android and do our best to make it as open as possible, Meego doesn't look like it's going anywhere. And I'm saying this as a happy N900/Maemo user.

Oracle has absolutely not "trashed" OpenDS technology

Oracle has trashed OpenSSO though, which was a pity.

I'm glad ForgeRock picked up the pieces, I guess Oracle was afraid it might cut into their "enterprise" IM business.

I would choose an Android, Microsoft, HP, RIM or even Apple ahead of Symbian. It was great for smartphones three years ago, but who would choose it today?

Agreed. Symbian as an OS isn't that bad. The symbian UI and menu structure is terrible, they simply failed to keep up.

5 years ago Nokia was by far the largest in the smartphone business. That made them lazy and slow to react. Along comes a company that decided to do touchscreens properly with a clean uncluttered UI and Nokia failed to respond.

It's really a shame. Instead of putting all their efforts into either Symbian (a proper touchscreen interface / refactoring) or Meego (actually releasing more than 1 product) they decide to haul in _another_ OS, one that is barely more mature than Meego. It doesn't matter which OS it is, splitting their resources so late in the game is suicide.

The point is you do not live with concepts (ask to somebody teaching math) you need to SELL them and to do that you need to know DETAILS of ever new and changing stuff. Nice the first 10 years of your careers, then you think, wow, I spend quite some time learning and nobody pays me anything... wow.

You are correct that as a small consultant you don't live with concepts. However why are you trying to sell them? Just learn a couple very well and keep an open mind to anything new that comes along.

As a small who^Wconsultant you should be selling only one thing properly: yourself. That is the only 'concept' that brings in the dough. If no one is paying you you aren't doing that very well, regardless of everything else that you know.

That's not meddling in the Middle East. It's stopping meddling in the Middle East.

Nope, that's still meddling.

The best the US can do is to simply leave Egypt alone. If they throw their weight on either side they are meddling with a country's internal affairs and simply planting the seed for the next revolution.

If the US drops support for Mubarak it will show to other supported dictators (Pakistan, SA etc) that US-support is limited when it comes to popular uprisings. Anti-government groups will use this weakness to topple their governments and dictators will have to choose between force or surrender.

If the US openly supports anti-government groups in Egypt this will bolster numerous groups even further and the US will be seen as a very untrustworthy ally at best. How would you see China if they openly backed revolutionary groups in the US? Even if those groups might be morally right, it still is meddling.

Alas, US interests are everywhere and not meddling will harm those interests. The reality is that Egypt is most likely a lose/lose/lose situation for the US.

Give them a try, I don't see how a HTML5 MMORPG (far7) lacks ambition and in my eyes it is more polished (and original) than freeciv.net.

I do agree that HTML5 gaming is wide open. Amazing work, a playable game using only Javascript would have been unheard of a few years ago.

Why are trying to "defeat" creationism? Why can't we just put the data and findings out there, and let people make their own decisions

Because putting creationism and evolution next to each other and letting the kids figure out which one is right isn't teaching?

Evolution should be taught during biology classes, christianity/islam/wicca can be taught during religion classes. There is no overlap and anyone that thinks there is should get a good slapping by one of His noodly appendages. These aren't the Dark Ages anymore.

Dear $DEITY, the number of times I've seen (mostly) PHP crapplications use CREATE DATABASE and CREATE / ALTER TABLE, often with ingenious naming schemes, instead of simply inserting new rows. Certain people shouldn't be allowed to touch databases.

If anyone needs me I'll be sobbing over my coffee.

Wouldn't it be ironic if Iron Neelie were to slam facebook for privacy abuses when she herself has a facebook page?

If she were to delete her profile in response to this it might be a good gesture. She has been pushing online privacy strongly, and facebook almost certainly doesn't comply to EU-US safe harbour privacy principles.